Delivering a new understanding of financial services customers

Virtually every institution – large and small – is laser-focused on finding new ways to generate revenue through cross-selling, up-selling, and other strategies to acquire, retain, and expand customer relationships. Long renowned for its payment and security solutions, Harland Clarke is now combining its industry expertise and marketing savvy with sophisticated customer relationship management analytics from SAS to help community and regional banks, credit unions, and large financial services firms better manage customer life cycles and improve marketing ROI.

Harland Clarke's marketing services team uses analytics and data services to help clients more effectively target new customers, "on-board" new customers, and execute cross-sell/up-sell campaigns. "With SAS, we're serving both ends of the market," said Sandeep Kharidhi, Vice President of Analytics and Business Intelligence. "Larger organizations have more complex needs, and we collaborate with their internal analytic teams to solve specific business problems, such as improving response rates or reducing churn."

Customer portfolio analysis

Smaller institutions might not have many resources for marketing analytics. For most of these clients, Harland Clarke provides two turnkey services. The first is customer portfolio analysis, where the company takes a bank or credit union's anonymous customer data (at the account level) and benchmarks it against a Harland Clarke industry database of dozens of metrics such as attrition or share-of-wallet. This analysis helps clients see the new marketing opportunities that are possible.

"We analyze all of the relationships the banking customer has with the institution," Kharidhi explained. "That could be deposits, loans, investments, credit cards, overdraft protection or online banking. We package up the results and deliver a strategic road map about their customer portfolio. We show them what revenue we believe is out there to be had. For instance, we know that as many as 22 percent of households leave a financial institution within the first year of opening an account – which is a significant loss in deposits and fee revenues. If we see higher-than-normal attrition rates, we might recommend an on-boarding campaign, which can reduce churn by more than 20 percent. This can equate to millions of otherwise lose dollars in revenue."

Stratics Predictive Modeling

Harland Clarke's second service offering is its Stratics Predictive Modeling. "Using our proprietary Stratics predictive models, we look at clients' customer files to identify areas for more effective and targeted cross-sell and retention efforts," said Kharidhi. "Stratics assesses more than 600 banking behaviors aggregated into 60 predictive models that show which customers are most likely to churn, which customers are most loyal and which are most open to cross-sell or next-most-likely product offers."

SAS helps us acquire new business and retain existing accounts. We're seeing significant business growth as a result.

Sandeep Kharidhi
Vice President of Analytics and Business Intelligence

After identifying the customer segments to pursue, the company delivers complete marketing services, including direct mail campaigns, email marketing, and contact center management to create new revenue streams. "We measure results and document the return on investment," he said. "Ultimately, these products help our clients maximize the impact of their limited marketing dollars."

Not surprisingly, these sophisticated analytics are supported by terabytes of rolling data stretching back as far as 12 years – data that gets updated every month, quarter and year. "We have analytics staff with a long history and experience with SAS," Kharidhi said, "We do our standard Stratics scoring routines in SAS and Enterprise Guide, then use macros and programs to create the output."

"SAS helps us expand our level of engagement with banks and credit unions, and it facilitates a more strategic dialogue with senior executives," Kharidhi said. "Our company's consultative sales process is energized by the power we find in SAS to develop new ideas and strategies for solving any marketing challenge. SAS helps us acquire new business and retain existing accounts. We're seeing significant business growth as a result."

Challenge

Provide sophisticated customer analytics to its clients to help them identify new marketing opportunities.